


Crunching Numbers

by Know_Your_Paradoxes



Category: Original Work
Genre: Battle of the Brains, College Searching, Competition, Cussing, Enemies, F/F, F/M, Gen, Grades, High School, Korean-American Character, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Original Fiction, Other, POV Third Person, Past Relationship(s), Prodigies, Rivalry, Senior year, Students, Swearing, The Race to College
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-10-28 15:52:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10834452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Know_Your_Paradoxes/pseuds/Know_Your_Paradoxes
Summary: Yi Seong-Hun and Kelan McNee are the two contenders for their high school's highest honor -- valedictorian. However, the two boys' personalities are incredibly different, and they can't help but clash. Who will overcome the other?





	Crunching Numbers

Yi Seong-Hun took in a deep breath. Ah, the scent of teenage angst and the faint lingering of gym classes of yore. This was his final year here at Ellisdale, and he was ready to get this over with. He had just broken things off with his (now ex-)girlfriend Hadley, and he was beginning to feel the aura of new beginnings flush over him. Seong-Hun had worked hard to get here.

If by working hard, you meant hardly working.

Things had always came easily to Seong-Hun. He had grown up embracing his surroundings and learning to be a social butterfly. He had had so many girlfriends throughout his years at Ellisdale that the tally the girls kept in the bathroom stalls had been painted over twice to get rid of the etchings that had been carved, due to sheer numbers. And the tally was still going. Hadley was now another statistic -- a small percentage of the girls that he had been there, dated. He felt bad about it right afterward, but he realized that he really didn't care about her the way that she cared about him, and that wasn't fair to her or him. And apparently, it had been mutual, since Hadley had been treating him as though he were her best friend ever since.

And now he was standing at the front steps, ready to face the world. It was the first day of his senior year, and dammit, he was going to SHINE.

Or at least... that's what he WAS thinking before he got his first test back.

He sat behind a kid named Kelan McNee, a local who had been born and raised in Ellisdale. A tall, lean, redheaded Irish-blooded boy that somehow managed to outshine him in the means of test scores every single year.

Kelan seemed like he didn't need to put forth any effort and he managed to ace a test perfectly. Meanwhile, Seong-Hun was busy constantly reading throughout his textbooks -- okay, skimming -- okay, not reading them at all -- and just barely missing McNee's scores by mere fractions of percentages, or by maybe one or two percentage points. He was frankly damn sick and tired of it. And what exactly was the deal with sitting him right behind the bastard so that he could stare at his scores in envy?

Seong-Hun tapped his pencil against the hard surface of his desk, brows furrowed. There was already talk about how he would be salutatorian, and Kelan would get all the credit in the world and be the valedictorian and win a surefire ticket to whatever college he chose. Like he even needed that. If he was just going to slack off and not even bother with the reading or the notes or anything, then why would he bother going to a prestigious school and wasting the state's money like that? Meanwhile, the hard workers, such as Seong-Hun, would get swindled and have to pay for their college tuition themselves, constantly swimming in debt for the rest of their lives. What the hell was up with that? What kind of backwards world were they living in?

Whatever. No time to think about that now. Only time to retake his test and make sure that he won that valedictorian's speech. If he didn't, his ass would be on the line. His mom and dad would be really upset, he would be upset with himself, and he would probably never get the chance to go to Harvard.

Another uneventful hour passed, full of lectures and boring shit and things that he would remember without the need for studying. People told him that he had a "photographic memory", but he didn't really buy into that kind of shit. He was just really good at remembering things. He would tend to associate things that he learned with different things that he knew about. For example, Davy Crockett was linked to the Alamo, which was linked to Texas, which was linked to Tex-Mex, which was linked to tacos. Tacos equal Davy Crockett. Flawless logic.

He managed to catch up with Kelan in the hallway, and grabbed the back of his shirt to try and slow him down. The taller boy looked down at him with wide, frightened eyes. "W-What is it?" he asked, voice quivering. He had a really low, smooth voice. It was odd to hear it come out of his mouth.

"Just what kind of bullshit are you trying to pull here, McNee?" he asked, teeth clenched.

Kelan's eyes only managed to get wider. "I don't understand what you mean!"

"You keep getting great scores. How the hell do you do that? You don't even fucking WORK for them! Meanwhile, I'm out here putting my brain through the fucking RINGER and I still manage to stay behind! Where do you get off knowing that you're a fucking genius?" His voice no longer sounded angry. It sounded bewildered, perplexed, genuinely almost impressed with how Kelan managed to do it.

Seong-Hun could notice sweat beginning to drip down his forehead. "I-I-I swear, I don't know what the hell you even mean." His voice was still baritone and somewhat smooth, even though there was clear panic in his eyes and shakiness in his legs. He was holding his arms up defensively as he looked Seong-Hun dead in the eyes, not even seeming to realize that he had dropped the supplies that he had been taking back to his locker onto the floor. Kelan was so tall, it was only then that he had even bothered to realize that. He was almost half a foot taller than him. That was unsettling. He felt small.

"I'm sure you don't, McNee. But trust me when I say that I'm going to kick your ass and become the valedictorian this year so that I can get my full ride to Harvard and become the greatest goddamn lawyer you've ever met."

He let go of the collar of Kelan's sweatshirt and began to walk away when he heard someone say, "Wow, Yi. Did your mother teach you to say all those scary words in English, or did you do that yourself?"

He turned around to face who said it, and was genuinely surprised when he saw Sanjiv Mirsha, the funniest guy in the entire school, not even just the senior class. He had always known that Kelan and Sanjiv were good friends, but he had never really seen the extent of their friendship before, and to be honest, he wasn't liking his chances of going against both McNee and Mirsha.

"Ah, I see the knight in shining armor has come to protect the damsel in distress." He rolled his eyes and then locked them back onto Sanjiv's. "What do you want, Mirsha?"

Sanjiv shrugged. "Oh, I want a lot of things. Maybe a sports car, a lucrative movie deal with Steven Spielberg, maybe a private yacht or two. World peace. To be able to fuck somebody for once in my natural-born life. To not have to defend innocent people from dickheads."

Seong-Hun had to admit, that one cut deep. "Why, Mirsha. That's no way to talk about McNee."

"You know who I'm talking about, Yi. Which reminds me, this is the first time in like 10 years that I've seen you think about somebody OTHER than yourself! Congratulations, you're not a complete sociopath! You're only mildly sociopathic! Pop the fucking champagne, we did it."

Kelan had his hand over his mouth -- a clear indication that he was laughing, or at least smiling. His eyes looked like they lit up whenever he was happy. Seong-Hun didn't feel like now was an appropriate time to mention that.

Sanjiv smirked. "Well, thank you for making us ALL late to class, Your Holiness. Shall I carry you to your next subject? Or do you get the pushovers from Harvard to do that for you, since they're already basically kissing your ass?"

"Without the valedictorian's scholarship, there won't BE Harvard in the cards for me, Sanjiv," he responded, forgoing the entire sarcastic reply. "And everybody knows how important that college and my future is to me. Being a lawyer is something that I've wanted for years. And trust me when I say that if anything gets in my way, I'll make sure that it's not in the way for long. Now, since you're in my way to my next class, would you kindly fuck off?"

Seong-Hun took in a deep breath as he parted the space between Kelan and Sanjiv wide enough so that he could slip through. He looked down the now mostly empty hallway. This was an odd sensation, being alone in a building full of people. He had never truly felt THIS lonely before. He didn't like it at all. Not one bit. It was something that scared him down to his very core. It felt like something was crawling inside of his skin, like it was itching at his own soul, trying to get him to scream out for someone to come talk to him.

He looked down at the tile flooring -- a new renovation they had done over the summer, and it showed, the floors were shiny enough to see your own reflection, which Seong-Hun had noticed a couple girls doing throughout the day -- and looked at himself. He didn't recognize whoever this was. He was too pale, his hair too dark, the bags under his eyes too prominent, the look on his face too empty to possibly be the real Yi Seong-Hun. He muttered a curse to himself in Korean. That was a plus side to being bilingual, nobody would question what you said in your mother tongue, even if it were something as devilish or crazy as the infamous "your mother sucks cocks in hell" quote from The Exorcist. (Although, to be fair, he had said the quote in Korean before, and it sounded much more eloquent when not phrased so bluntly.)

Regardless, he didn't recognize himself. Who was the person staring back at him in the reflection? Why was he there, and what had he done to the original Seong-Hun?

He shook off the looming sense of dread and opened his locker. His combination lock had broken (some freshman girl from a year ago had been pretty obsessed with him and she had accidentally broken his lock while trying to hide a love letter inside his locker) so it was easy to pry and retrieve the books he needed for AP Calculus.

He then heard a low, quiet voice say, "I'm sorry for the way Sanjiv talked to you, Seong-Hun."

After finding the books he needed, he closed his door to find none other than the tall, redheaded, slender guy he had just confronted in the hallways not but 2 minutes earlier. And he was eerily close. Seong-Hun instinctively jumped back a little.

"What do you want, McNee?" he asked, sizing up the competition.

"I wanted to apologize for Sanjiv. He can be..."

"A fucking shitdick?" Seong-Hun finished. He scoffed. "Yeah, no kidding. I mean, everybody knows how important going to Harvard is for me, right...?"

Kelan shrugged. "I have no idea if everybody knows that, but I know it. But I want you to know that I've worked every damn bit as hard as you have for my grades. I've spent nights upon nights on end cramming for tests that won't even be given out for another week or so. I keep myself occupied by equations and Shakespearean literature, and economic policies. It's a living hell. But I commend you for wanting to go after your dreams."

He chuckled. "I still don't even know what I want to do with MY life yet."

Seong-Hun noticed a twinkle in his eyes that was really inconvenient because it just so happened that his breath caught at the exact same time. What a piece of shit the universe was, for rigging things to make it seem like he cared about Kelan McNee at all. He nodded slightly in response. "I get that. It's just... I've been so fascinated by the world of law and crime and punishment that it seems unnatural for me NOT to want to go to Harvard and become the best I can be."

"I know. And I'm sure you'd make a damn fine lawyer wherever you end up going to school." Kelan shifted a little before continuing. "But if I don't get the valedictorian scholarship, I won't be able to go to college at ALL. My mom is single and I have three sisters and three brothers. I work a part-time job, but it's not enough to keep too much food or anything on the table. And being able to afford college education with THAT kind of pressure...? That's not something that's easily done, Seong-Hun. You have to understand that, too, right?"

He bit his bottom lip softly. He had never heard Kelan talk this much before, much less open up and show him a whole new side of him that he had never even known or thought about before.

"Yeah... Do you know what this means, McNee?"

"Are we going to have to fight to see who goes to college?"

"Yep. That's exactly it."


End file.
